Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Instacart)

25:04And that triadding in that moment creates a high affinity, highly likely heard that the person who needs help and the person who you're connecting with but are going to see mutual benefit from one. And I think I find it like just doing that and seeding that and being really focused on what the opportunity or the challenges tends to lead to better connections as opposed to just reaching out and saying, hey, I like your style, will you be able to? So essentially share with folks you trust. Here's what I'm working on. See if they recommend someone that could help you with that specific skill versus assuming that there's this person that can help you with this skill.

25:40That's right. I love it. But going back to your advice on career, something that you wrote about in your post plus folks have told me you're really big on, is this something you call understand work? Does that ring a bell? Yes, it does. Talk about that and why that's important. And certainly, can I take credit for understand work? This is a part of an old Facebook framework of understand, identify, execute. What I probably will say is, I guess I've been the shepherd for understand work in other companies, like I've taken it from my time at Facebook and really institute it rigorously at Instagram, then it instacard and when I worked at Twitter and now at YouTube.

26:18The way I like to talk about with my teams is that, you know, first I tell a story actually and the story is is, you know, we've all had a moment where we have worked on something with the team, super excited, finally launches and we go out to dinner and we celebrate. And you know, celebrating everyone's juiced, you know, it's great night. You go back to the office the next day and you look at the metrics and metrics of flat. And everyone's a little bummed like, why did this happen? Why the metrics flat? What happened? We worked so hard. And ultimately when you unpack it, you realize that you built something that you thought was going to be a good idea.

26:54But you really didn't understand a lot of key components of what people really needed, what pain points really existed, or what were the alternatives and what the real value of those alternatives were in the market, or exactly how the product needed to work, what the flywheel or what the experience needed to be. And so that is what I call the anti -paran of what we want to do. And I call that identify, justify, execute. Right? Well, you identify something. Someone says, hey, you know what? this would be a great debilit, and you identify that. And then you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build.

27:29And then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it in order to make it work, but it ultimately doesn't succeed. And that is the anti -pattern to what is kind of like the Facebook kind of way of thinking, which is understand, identify execute. Right? So first you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on. So when we talk about understand work, there's a few ways to think about it. One is it is an intentional affordance in your execution to do the work that helps you to de -risk a project and to learn what's going on. When I say an intentional affordance meaning you put it down like Lenny is going to work on the biggest thing, right?

28:09Lenny as a product manager is going to write a strategy. Janice as a designer is going to design a prototype like whatever the thing is you put it down as actual an item as opposed to assuming it's going to happen in the We don't make an affordance for understand work, then the work doesn't get done, and everyone just sprinting on execution. And so it's a planned, intentional time to the team's bandwidth to figure out what is it that we need to do to understand what's happening. And so, you know, for example, with an Instagram, we get a lot of understand work of what makes for a good connection.

28:43Like, how do we want to think about that? How do we want to make sure that we're actually growing a graph, a social graph that makes sense? And so I might work with data science to do understand work to like pull up one one and look at the different types of connections for different types of users and make it make sense, right? And engineering might do understand work to instrument logging to make sure that we have the data that we need in order to tell the story. And so you're doing this understand work to basically better understanding gaps in knowledge. What's also really interesting is that understand work helps you to clarify what is a root cause, or what is a job to be done, or what is the right use case.

29:24And because the team adopts this mentality, it becomes this forcing function for execution. So when someone says, we should build, we should build this, you have a team that's enabled and empowered to say, that's a good idea, but we don't actually understand these three things before we start working on that. So maybe we should do understand work to make sure that that is actually the right idea. Right? And so what you end up getting by embracing this concept is two things. You get parallel paths to work. So every sprint, let's say you do a three -week sprint or a three -month roadmap, you're executing on the things that you have a lot of conviction around and you also do an understand work in parallel.

30:09And so at the end of the sprint, you have learnings from what you executed. Wow, that test of that launch work really well. We should double down. Oh wow, that test of launch didn't work Here's how we should pay it and you have insights from the understand work And you're used both of those to plan the next sprint or roadmap Right, and so because you have this parallel path you end up getting this velocity multiplier over time Right, so the next sprint and the third sprint and the fourth sprint every subsequent sprint you've de -risked new ideas You've got more clarity and so you do more execution, you do better execution, and you move faster and The things you ship you have a higher win rate when the things you ship right and you know you're you're shipping when I remember when I left in Savannah This is many years ago, but we had like had 15 teams and we might have Been running 12 to 20 experiments a quarter a team and I would say probably 60 to 70 % of them were like positive and shippable, which is incredible.

31:10I mean, you would think about multiple out of magnitude of that. And it was because we were so effective at risking and understanding what was going on. This is really interesting. I imagine many people listening are like, we put time into understanding. We were in experiments. We were at strategy docs. We do user research. What is it that you think people are, where do you think they're missing? Is it that you dedicate people's like actual time, like you're just doing understand work instead of building anything for this next sprint, you're just going to be telling us what the problem here or opportunity is.

31:41Like, how do you actually operationalize this versus just what people probably already do, which is, you research data dives? What I found is a couple things. One is when your team does not fully understand a problem space, the balance of work tends to be higher like, I think when I started at YouTube, we were doing 60 % execution, 40 % understand work. And over time, as we understand more and more, the mixed shifts, now my team is probably doing 80 % execution 20 % or 85 % and 20 % and 15 % on the same work. And so it's not just about writing a strategy, it's about saying, okay, if we have these themes of stuff that we want to work on, what do we know with confidence because the data tells us?

32:30And what do we need to understand because we don't have the data, we don't have the research to be on the insights. And really being honest with yourselves around what are the things that are low to meet an effort, but high likelihood of being impactful because you have the data. And what are the things that you are interested in perhaps doing, but because you're missing something, you're missing research or a feedback from users or data or some insights or strategy, you should actually say, I'm going to go do this before I do something else. Right? You know, an example of this is one of my teams does ships paid virtual goods in the live experience in YouTube.

33:11And that's a really, really important and hard problem space. And when I joined, we didn't really fully understand the whole lot ecosystem like how we lived in that live ecosystem, how our products worked, where the biggest opportunity was. So the first and most important piece of understand work was instead of shipping iterations to the current product. We needed to actually get the funnel of what was happening, right? Like what's happening with how many people are watching live every day? How many people are clicking through? How many people are seeing our experience? How many people are actually buying it?

33:42We didn't really fully have the experience mapped out. And to understand where were the gaps and where are the problem places? And like where should we be focusing? And so we had to do that. And that was understandable for multiple people, for multiple teams. We had to do on the engineering side. We needed data science as analysis. We need to PM to go and dog through the experience and figure out what was broken. But all of that was intentional and important to our roommates. What's interesting about this is that this is very counterintuitive to how people would probably approach, hey, we need a speed up execution, we need a speed up growth, we need to shift more, more execute, go faster, do more.

34:19And what you're saying is you find the impact comes from actually slow down how much we're and spend more time understanding to execute more intelligently. So I slow down a speed up. Fascinating. Because it's interesting, I have a bunch of questions that emerge that are folks that you've worked with, and many of them are around how you turn a culture around, speed things up, and drive growth in a really meaningful way. And it sounds like this is one of your key strategies, is get people to spend more time understanding before diving into a bunch of stuff. It does sound counter -insertive, But if you actually think about it, what is a better outcome?

34:58Is a better outcome to just ship more faster now, but most of the things aren't unimpactable, right? Or is it a better outcome to ship fewer things, but really work on making sure that you're shipping them in the best way and de -risking a lot of other things so that a year later, you'll win rates higher and your velocity higher. Yeah, I think countertuitive is the wrong word. I think it like makes sense. I think it's just no one does this. Usually everyone's like, move faster. We need more ship, more experiments. Well, I mean, this is the irony of growth as people think growth is overnight success.

35:33And it's not, right? It is a lot of short wins and short term execution for a longer term gain. And really understanding you have a lot of short terms, short towards a longer term outcomes. So that people can take away this lesson. And can you help people understand just when you say understand work? Like, what does that look like generally? Is it just a dedicated time to dive into data and answer a bunch of questions? You've sent them. Is it running experiments to test hypotheses? Like, what does that usually look like when you're here? Let's do 40 % understand work. The understand work sometimes comes from me, but most often comes from the teams sometimes.

36:17And every function can do and should should be doing understand work at some point. And so it really depends on what the function is. So for an engineer, it could be looking at the code and saying, OK, we want to improve this. I need to do understand work to understand, do we need to refactor this code and how scalable is it? And what do we need to do to make sure that we can execute fast and make sure that we're not going to have a lot of starting sounds? That could be understand work. It could be actually instrumenting the data and making sure that we actually have four or visibility and what's going on.

36:50Data science, like we work a lot with data science doing activation metrics and like understanding proxy metrics, right? Like that's understand work, because it helps us to figure out what we need to build and where to focus. For product management, sometimes understand work is figuring out the partnership strategy ahead of like actually launching the product because you need to go figure out how the pieces are going to come together. So it really just depends on what the function is. But when I say it should be coming from the bottoms up, what I mean is I encourage the team when we plan a sprint or plan a roadmap to ask a question.

37:28So like identify the key themes that they need to work on. And when they ask a question on a key theme, also ask what else do we need to understand to make this end? And to end that planning session to make sure that you're including cross -functional partners. So it's not just product. that just product design and data science and engine, you also include go -to -market, you also include marketing, because if you're not inclusive, then you don't really understand what the issues are. My PM brain is afraid of creating too much understand work and nothing getting done. How do you find that balance?

38:03So we're just sitting, we're gonna be understanding for hours and days and weeks and months and not shipping much. How do you do doing? I'm running, I told them you have to ship. I mean, you always have to ship, right? Like it's, sometimes I give them, sometimes it's helpful, especially early on because it takes a while for people to get the head around why this is so critical. I say, you know, we should choose, sometimes I'll give them guidance. We should choose three to four understand projects that are gonna really help us this roadmap and figure out what they are, right? So choose your top three or four and then let's talk about it and I'll give them guidance.

38:41or I'll say figure out, there should always be some execution. So initially, you're looking for low effort high impact things to execute against. So, build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort high impact, some of which should be medium effort high impact. And sometimes, understand what actually looks like doing a cheap test. doing a task that's going to help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is like a good enough experience that can enforce right and so identifying ways to do that and so it's really about just managing expectations and helping people to be clear that The goal is to ship the product, but you want to ship the things that you have more confidence and understanding versus that.

39:29So I think a big takeaway here is if you want to have more impact move faster to try to spend a little more time understanding the problems you're going after in the opportunity space. That's right. I'll give you a very tactical example is when I joined Instagram in January 2016, believe it or not, the horn boarding, the sign -up flow, I didn't see them, had a lot of no logging to it. It had logging of how many people started and how many people ended. And I joined in January and it was like, we had to write a roadmap. And so the roadmap looked like this. Okay, we know this amount at the top of the funnel and this amount at the bottom of the funnel and there is eight steps in the funnel and we don't know what is going on.

40:10Right, so the first bit of on the fan work was we needed to do, like, the instrumentation of, like, that funnel as fast as possible to get the data to figure out where the drops were happening and what to fix. But because we knew of what was happening at the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel, we can go and play around with the experience and see what was broken. So we ran a bunch of tests of stuff that was obviously broken to see what would improve. Right? And so it was like a mix. And so what we did, we set up time where we did the beginning of like first couple of weeks, add logging, ship it to code, re -evaluate in the middle of the quarter, look at the full funnel, and then add more things that we can do later on once we got that.

40:53But like in order to get that done, that involved, understand, growth marketing to figure out what was the schemers for the instrumentation, right? The engineering to actually do that locking, right? Data science, like, pull together the phonos and dashboard. All of that had to come together at all at one time. I really like just this concept of calling understand work. I think that alone is a powerful tool. We're going to spend more time on understand work. Just people, it feels like it gives meaning to stuff that otherwise people would pressure side. Right. Where it's just like, no, no, no, let's just ship stuff.

41:21Let's just try stuff. Let's just test this step. We'll see what happens. Is there anything else you have seen and often do to help a team you join move faster and grow bigger? And I've heard that you've had a lot of impact on a lot of different cultures. So I'm curious if there's anything else that is really effective. I've found myself in a bunch of interesting situations where I had to come in and help improve cultures, change cultures around teams. I found this framework. I don't even actually remember where I got it from, but it like it travels from computer to computer with me and team the team.

41:57And it's, you know, called managing complex change. I actually think I got it from my business school or something. And it's really interesting. It's got like these five components to it. You know, this vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan. And you need all of those to have change, right? Like you need, the team needs that vision. They need to have the skills. They need to have the right incentives. Sometimes some teams are incentivized to do some things versus others. You need to have the right resources and the right places. You need that with clear action plan. And what I'm not about is framework is if you can visualize it and maybe you can share it with your progress.

42:34Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen on YouTube. So folks can see what you're talking about. It's basically what it does as it shows where if you're missing anyone component and you get different outcomes. So if you're missing the vision component you end up in a state of confusion. Or if you're mission the incentives, you end up in a state of resistance because people on the Sunnivizer do the right work. Or if you're missing an action plan, you end up in a state of false starts. So I use this, and I think about this a lot actually, because when you come in as a leader, as someone who's supposed to influence change, you have to really observe what's happening.

43:10And figure out what are the challenges, like anecdotally and what are you observing. And then I figure out where I can plug in and what I can do to make the teams better. And what I tend to find is, you know, move it from the right side to the left side of this, like action plans are easier to institute. Right? So, you know, if I see a team that's like struggling in the execute, I want to do they have the right type of PRD framework, or they're communicating wrong. Do they have the right type of team meeting structures? Those are like how I'm lower hanging fruit. It's a lot harder to change vision and skills.

43:41It will come in time, but what I also have done over the course of my career is I've built just like This deck that comes with me of like different like how to the different skills then They're like what are different skills? What are different frameworks? How do you think about it to help up level teams fast? Right because I find that sometimes you walk in and not everyone is grounded in the same mental models of concepts One example of this, I talk about a lot, is Instagram's VAM has just fantastic culture of thinking about how do we ship high, high quality products. What does product craft mean?

44:21And so that is something that I came to YouTube and my team's particular, they didn't have a mental model for product craft. So I found myself talking into an echo chamber in some way. So I had to build a deck that showed, okay, here's how I think about product craft. Here's a framework for it. Here's how to think about like all of these different things. And so now we have a shared language, shared communication for and a repository of skills that we're going to go. So I'm looking at this image that we'll have up. So in this case, their skills weren't necessarily there, which in this framework leads to anxiety.

44:55And so what I'm hearing essentially come into a team. You're like, what am I feeling? Is a confusion, frustration, the wrong thing? and that kind of tells you which of these buckets to spend time on. That's right. And then within those buckets, you've got to figure out what are the right lovers that you need to pull, what are the things that are missing, how do you really focus in like where do you kind of like spend your time? So interesting. I love that you. This image is just like this very grainy, sold screenshot from some old McKinsey deck. It's 2006 PC or something. I love it. So you have this thing, you have this deck.

45:28You just come in with all these tools in your tool about, is there anything else in that list of things that you bring with you to help change culture and help teams? I think one thing I think about a bunch is, I come from my back runs a little bit different than traditional tech executive. There was actually three phases to my career. I was in education for six years, Tarte and inner city DC, and then was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which is like a little flat. I went to business school and I worked on Wall Street for a bit and then I left my job on Wall Street quit and started to start up.

46:03Start up was a glorious failure as many startups are, but it was like a very non -traditional path towards tech. And I think a lot of my time in these other industries actually shapes the way I think about product management and actually changing teams and building teams. And what I mean by that is like, you know, I think there's a lot of similarities between education and product management. Believe it or not. When I was interviewing for my first set of jobs in tech recruiters would say to me, how does your background relate? Like I don't really see it. And I would tell them, you know, when I was in education, I would walk into a classroom of 24 -70 -year -olds and these kids owed me nothing.

46:49And I needed the only way I could be successful or impactful is I needed to be able to be a strong communicator. I needed to be able to have a clear vision of what was going on. I needed to be able to influence them in a believable way, except that they would get on board with what needed to be done for 270 days of the year. It's like, you know, when you walk into a room as a product manager, engineers, designers, researchers, go to market, nobody owes you anything. And the only thing that you're going to do in order to be successful is you need to be a strong communicator. You have a clear vision of what's going on and you need to be able to influence them to do the things together.

47:24What matters, right? Very similar skill set, just different domain expertise. And so because of that, right, like, I really adopted a mindset of like, how do I coach my teams, how do I enable them? Because it's really about the sum of the parts versus me being a top down leader saying, you have to do this and you have to do that. And so I think a lot about that in both approach and the processes that we create. And to give you a couple of examples of this, there's two things I want to call out. One is, actually this education framework is called balloon taxonomy. I think it's changed over time, but when I learned it was basically a pyramid.

48:07The pyramid was, in BlumTech, Sonny describes what's different levels of order of critical thinking you need in order to be a master of something. And at the bottom of the pyramid was knowledge, and then it's comprehension, and then application analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. And so growing up the pyramid means it's higher order of thinking. And I think about that a lot in trying to understand where where our right teams struggling, Do they have the core knowledge that they need? Do they understand it, but they can't apply it? Are they applying it, but they're not able to analyze it across the business segments?

48:44And you can use this framework not only with the ICPMs and the teams themselves, but also for your managers. What is breaking down? And in using that and attaching that to the skills that we want to build to figure out how do you fill in those gaps? And it really is a grounding for me, a ground and mental model, for how do you build teams that actually affect them, how do you meet people where they are, as a host that you're saying, hey, you need to figure this out. Right, I find that too often in tech and also in product, people ask to figure things out, but not given the support to get there.

49:17And there's no way to really connect the dots to them. Amazing, I am pulling up the Bloom's taxonomy. So essentially, if you see a PM struggling, what you try to do is figure out which of these things do they not have. How are you not supporting them? How can you support them better? So it could be the skills that they understand. What are some of the other things that often you find that maybe hinder a product manager's success? A lot of times, they might have the understanding, but they haven't had a chance to apply it to a variety of different scenarios or haven't seen it apply to multiple scenarios.

49:52So oftentimes, you might understand a concept like machine learning, but you haven't actually worked on it in multiple against multiple scenarios. I also saw you maybe have one way of doing it that doesn't make sense and you need to have two or three. You don't even know that two or three ways of doing this. That is often a common failure point. Or it's maybe how to apply it, but you can't synthesize why this thing that you're doing actually matters for the business context. Oftentimes that becomes a challenge with managers. They know what to do, but they don't understand how to tie it back to the business context and overall strategy needs.

50:29and so we're to prioritize it. Right? And so what I find is that like, you know, when you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live at the top of the pyramid. You are responsible. Managers responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of the pyramid or control them. They need to be able to synthesize and evaluate what's happening for each product team that they own in order to kind of make the bigger picture connections. By the way, I love your metaphor of product managers are like this group of seven year old, we have to learn how to manage influence.

51:03Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, it is they're not like a group of seven year old. The same skills. Yeah, same skills. The same skills. Same skills. I mean, I think it's true. Like I found it actually significantly harder for me to get 24, 7 years to believe in what I was doing, then to walk into a room with Kevin Sish, from my creditor and explain to learn what's the strategy for growing the next hundred million users on or an incident. These are very logical adults who can reason with you and you've got a classroom of kids. It's not quite the same. So, those skills are really critical. I love that.

51:36I definitely want to ask about your Instagram days. Is there anything else in this bucket of wisdom of you kind of talked about things you've learned about how to manage product managers and managers of managers? Is there anything else there that might be helpful to folks that you've learned? One thing, they also think about a lot. But I don't know if this is just a me thing, but I think about PM as a team sport, right? It's leading product teams is really about being the coach and helping other people to see what their role is on the team and maximize them. People talk a lot about product as a CEO, and actually fully believe that analogy.

52:17If you think about as a team sport, there's a few things that kind of shake out. One is not everyone's gonna be a star player, but not everyone needs to be a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant, right? You need a new role players. You need really strong role players. You need people who feel valued in their role and you need to understand how to groom those role players and how to make sure that they have the right seat at the table in the right place. Right? So I think it's yes here the conductor of the orchestra, but you're really more than that. You're really like kind of the culture of the team. Another thing I think about a lot is you know have a good friend who's a a college basketball coach, and he talked me about kind of this idea of your coaching tree.

52:58And this is a really important concept, especially in college basketball, it's like you as a head coach, you take a lot of pride in who were your assistants, who was your first assistant, the second assistant, the third assistant. And where do they go on to be head coaches? And what legacy do they have? Because you were able to install a bit in them, right? And so the coaching tree of a Mike Shashesky, The coaching and tree of a John Calibur, these like the steam coaches, not only because of what they've done, but because of the tree that they've built. I like to think about this as well, because I think it's really important for product leaders to think about what is there like a leadership tree.

53:33Who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to get to their next law? I think about this a lot. I have people who I've worked with who are running growth is straight, or the CPR you're at chief for now running stories and Instagram that were on my team in the earlier days. And, and, you know, their success is my success. And I'm proud for them, right? I'm happy for them. And I think it kind of like reinforces the mentalities, your responsibility to coach people up to greatness. So what I'm hearing is you put a lot of value in your team on them coaching folks, whether they're managers or even ICs is helping them understand that it's important to coach folks on their team and help them develop that it's part of your job, essentially.

54:21That's part of your job. I mean, you're trying to build over positive skills and positive knowledge and team velocity and the only way you can do that is everyone is like, so rise and tide has to lift all votes. Amazing. And interestingly, that probably teaches you how to do your job better because you're in teaching. You actually learn things a lot better. That's right. It forces you to figure out how can you get things off of your plate so that you can go work on bigger things. And how good does it feel when folks that you used to manage and go on to do bigger and better things? That's great.

54:52I want to talk a little bit about growth within YouTube. I heard that you haven't been there for that long and apparently you've already two extra, three extra more. Something important within YouTube, I don't know exactly the details and people are very impressed with the impact you've already had. And apparently a lot of the success there and other places is how you think about growth through flywheels. You always look for the flywheel that helps drive growth. Can you just talk about either at YouTube, ideally YouTube, whatever you can share, because that's pretty impressive, especially for a company that's scale that you're making so much impact, or other places, just how you think about why wheels and growth.

55:29Well, it's very generous. I wouldn't say, like, we've done some really good work, some good work so far on YouTube. And it's been a journey. I think I do think a lot about flywheels. I think it's actually a lot of growth is really understanding what is the value profit all of the different points of the experience, especially if you have a multi -sided marketplace, right? Like a multi -sided marketplace for YouTubers like, you know, the creator, what the creators are trying to achieve both from an engagement perspective but also for me for monetization perspective. And then for the viewer, the purchaser, like, you know, where they had, like, what are they trying to do and where they're missing the opportunity.

56:13I can't really go into specifics a bunch with YouTube, but whatever I say is this. One thing that I always do when I come in is I try to push my team to really dog food products in their adjacent user state, if you will. What I mean by that is often a product that you and I use that we've been using for years isn't actually the product that we're building for other people. Like a power user who's using a product has so much history and so much informed the knowledge on how that product, for that product to actually create a great experience for you, that if you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience.

57:02Right? And there's a lot of obvious opportunities missed, especially with what is the fly -wheel and why things are working and not working, if you don't actually go and use things in a new state. Right? And an example of this when you talk about YouTube is a lot of the YouTube graph for searching stuff is based on what have you watched in the past. So if you go and search, you search history, it's going to be about like well what have you watched in the past or what have you searched for and what can we show you that's going to be what we can better predict but if you don't have a lot of search history then they're not going to do as good of a job.

57:37So that's not exact direct translation for what we were doing but for me I work on freedom monetization and there are really important flywheels around like what does it take for a creator to make content that can help them to monetize how do we get that content to people and where and to what extent are we getting that content to people? And how do we make sure that people feel good about what they're receiving to people who are paying? Right? And all of those fly -wheels have to work. And so part of what I've been able to do is really think about how do we connect the dots and a story that the teams can uniquely understand, can help them lonely man even more, and have clarity and purpose of work.

58:15Right? Sometimes what's super important about the fly -wheel is actually enabling for your teams to know what to work going what not to work on, right? And then it also helps us to understand what do we know, and what do we not know about creators and viewers and monetization operations so that we can do the understand work to improve the velocity and to prove the impact. And that's really where we're in focus. And so we did, I did a lot of this in YouTube, but you also did this in Instacart really thinking about when I joined Instacart, one of the questions I had was like, how would people in their daily lives, how does their daily life actually reflect in the purchase experience.

58:50Are we making it easy for them? Because when you buy groceries, you're not going grocery shopping because you want beautiful ingredients in your fridge. You're going grocery shopping because you're actually having meals put together. Or are we actually reflecting the real job to be done, which is I'm gonna buy tacos. I'm gonna make taco Tuesday. Can we make it easier for people to find ingredients for tacos? As opposed to having them sort for tortillas and tomatoes and avocado. kind of. Right? So it's a really thinking about what is a job and then what is the fly where to make that happen and how we make this come to life.

59:24There's so many things that I want to follow up on here. First of all, I realized that all of the things you worked on, I am a daily active user of our weekly active user, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Insticart about weekly active user. I think that might be, yeah, wow, nice job. You got me, got me in the flyway, hold the ball, you're flying I'm glad my efforts and improved your life just a little bit. Nice work. Ideally. Okay. So a couple of takeaways here. One is you think about the value prop at every interaction of both sides if it's a multi -sided marketplace or if it's just like, why would I be doing this?

1:00:01So it's like, why would I send an invite to my friend? Why would I share this photo? Why would I open up in Sticker? And then you think about the jobs to be done during the day of a potential user and how can we flow into that versus not connect to their actual data -to -the -experience? And is the product actually working? Like, as I'm doing this, I'm looking, saying, is the product actually set up to deliver these things? Do we actually see it work? I think there's a lot of assumptions that the product works. But a lot of times, the team will surprise and we build the pieces of a flow, but not actually build the experience, the output.

1:00:36Like, they don't design it in a way where you're getting the real output. That's such an easy to miss point you're making here, which is you just think about, hey, I have Taco Tuesday. I'm actually as a product manager on Instacar. I'm going to open up the app and use it in this use case and see how it goes. That's right. And most people don't do that is what you realize. That's human. Right. Another example of this, right? Like, this is, you know, you know, it's a government of Instacar. Instacar made it really hard to reorder stuff. Super hard do we order? And it was shocking to me because when I thought about it, when I got the grocery store, 90 % of the time, I'm getting the same stuff, right?

1:01:11It's like, you know, maybe not at a trip, but over the course of a month or two, you've got a list of things that are portable and stable, and then occasionally, you know, like how many time I went to Peppermint Burke chocolate or something, you know, like it's not, like it's like this, like random snapshot on the throw in, but like there's, And so when we looked at the data, it turns out like after five times you go to Instagram card, 90 % of the order was to say, right? But like when you wanted to reorder, at least back then, you couldn't go and reorder easily. You had to dig and find it like seven or eight clicks.

1:01:46And when you did reorder, you had to reorder the whole thing. You couldn't take pieces. You couldn't take, I wouldn't take the milk in the blueberries. Right? And so you think about growth, right? You think about what does it mean to grow an Instagram card? What does it mean to actually drive better retention? Well, it's actually really important to make it easy for people to make the next order, right? And so the product wasn't really built for that, though people had the best intentions in life. The adjacent order. Exactly. I imagine that was maybe one of the biggest growth wins in his Instagram history is just the reorder the same thing, because I do that all the time.

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1:03:05Get $1 ,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta .com slash Lenny. That's V -A -N -T -A .com slash Lenny. You mentioned this concept of the Vigiant user kind of adjacently, but I think it's we're spending a little more time here. It's like this term you popularized and you explained it somewhat, but it may be explained a little bit more because I think it's really powerful for people in that how you think about growth. It was, yeah, this was something that came out of actually my time at Instagram. It was kind of a framework that we came up with because Instagram really was at that time, we grew so fast that the people who were using Instagram and February were completely different than people who were using it the following October in the next January.

1:03:49I think when I joined we were at like 445 million monthly active January 2016 at the end of that year we're at 636 million. We like 47 % that year. And so you know when we talk to users first half of 2016 you know when we talk to women in the US in their 30s they're like Robert Abbott Instagram. I have a Facebook account. Literally people said that right that was that long ago. And then like a year later, it's like, of course, I'm using Instagram. Instagram is my everything. The world changed so fast. And so when you're in a hype of a product, it's really, really important to understand who your users are today.

1:04:28And the persona of the user, what motivates them, why they're using it. But then also, to understand who is the next user, who could be using this product. But for some reason, and it doesn't work for them. And understanding who that adjacent user is and when you're actually starting to see that adjacent user adopt the product. And one of the ways you start to see their adjacent user starting to adopt the product, especially with the data, is you start seeing cohort curves decline. You start seeing the people who sign up today, three or six months from now, they're signing up and they're doing worse job.

1:05:06Nothing's changing the product, But just the understanding of how the product should work is different. They might be less tax savvy, right? On the scale of an earlier doctor versus like late majority, they might be closer to the late majority. And so we saw this at Instagram, right? Like we would always be working on registration flow. And at one point we were converting at some insanely high percent. And then three months later it would go down by 15%. Right? Not because anything was broken, but just because we've broken into new markets. You're bringing on people in India or you're bringing on people in the Philippines.

1:05:38And they're understanding how it works, the phone they use, etc. are all different. So really the core of their JSON users is a few things. One is like, you know, you have to understand who is using your product today and why. And when you're growing at some really strong pace 30, 40, 50 percent or more per year, you've got to be on top of who is your next, who you believe the next user is and why. And then you also have to be the JSON user, you definitely use the product life expectancy, how it's working, what's broken with it. And so at an Instacart, the adjacent user, the original user might have been like, an office admin who is going to buy this thing every week because of during happy hours and team staff.

1:06:21But then the next adjacent user might have been the mom of three or four, or the dad of three or four who's home with the kids, and they need to depend on Instacart. or, right, Burce is, you know, like later on, it might be their single person in New York who does this out of convenience, right? But like, what they're optimizing for, how they use the product all changes, and the functionality and the abilities are fundamentally different. So you have to be them, you have to watch how they use the product, you have to talk to them, and you have to visit them, and literally see what they're doing in real time, in order to make sure that you're enabling the right jobs.

1:06:57I love just this, the visualization of the Jason Euser. Basically, your growth is going to come from not existing users. It's the users right outside that circle of free users are today. And you need to think about what do they need that existing users maybe don't need. You said that this is most powerful for hyper growth companies. Is this something you think people like all companies should be thinking about? Or is it a lot less important if you're not a hyper growth business? So it's a great question. I think it's essential mandatory for hyper growth. I think it's very helpful if you have a product or company that is not growing what you want it to be.

1:07:34And so you're focused on capturing more share wallet instead of expanding your audience. And so sometimes you can imagine like a cosmetics company for example, that's like digitally enabled. You can imagine that they've hit a ceiling in terms of the growth of their users, and they're really just trying to get people to buy more products, but maybe they're missing like the people who want to use their product are missing something from your current product, right? Maybe you're missing different skin tone shades, right? Or maybe you're missing certain types of tools, right? So really talking to who is just outside of your current user base, who's coming to your product and looking around and not buying and understanding what are their needs and thinking out, how do you enable for them?

1:08:16How do you build the right experience for them in order to be coming to your product? So what I'm hearing is spend some understand work to figure out who your potential the users are and then use the product as them and see What is missing? I imagine user research goes into this you're not actually gonna understand necessarily all the things they need so it's probably fine folks in like cohort and see how they use the product awesome The question I had on my mind as you're talking you've come into so many companies and and helps them with growth. What do you find most of the opportunities often lie?

1:08:50Is it like onboarding activation? Is there a trend like that? You feel like here's probably there's going to be opportunity here, or is it super mixback? Usually it's somewhere in the onboarding to like, have it building experience, right? What does it take for someone to actually understand the value? that first moment, that first I have moment in the product, and a lot of teams that's shocking how many teams don't really understand what that moment is for them, and then also how do you get them to build havoc around the product. Oftentimes a lot of people quit growth to top of funnel, and that is also critical.

1:09:31I think having the right top of funnel motion is really critical in building on that. So I think there's one quarter, it's like once you have the the right top of funnel motion to get people to come in. How do you help to make sure that the finding value and the building habit and their routine? Because that's the thing that helps you to compound over time, right? Like if you're bringing in a lot of people up and they're not staying around, then you just have a leaky bucket and like it doesn't matter how big it's off the phone with. So making sure that that first month and two month, three month experiences great.

1:10:03And then the other part is really figuring out how do you build compounding growth loops where it's not just one way of acquiring people, but you're building two and three and four ways that lay on to each other, that help you to really supercharge your engine of like acquiring people. So to inst the Graham, if you kind of look at where Instagram is and what, how it's there in group, there's a lot that goes into it, but if you actually unpack the top of funnel for what work at Instagram, there's certainly a component of it, which was our core component, which was invitations. People inviting you and making sure that those invitations work, and they work well, and that people's friends are coming on, you get notified.

1:10:48But another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was like the celebrity partnerships was critical, right? Because basically, they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand. And that was a critical growth funnel because with that, you had the ability for them to create these celebrities and celebrity creators to set the norm for how the platform gets used. They also work getting picked up by the news and the media for all the stuff that's happening in the celebrity world, which is then added on to this other growth level, which had which was SEO.

1:11:35And so every time a news article came out, they would link to the creators or the celebrities into the grand account or that particular post. And so you have this whole SEO engine that worked. And the SEO engine was because you have both web, which we launched at Instagram, which created the canonical, kind of like SEO tables. And then you had all these inbound links from these celebrity sites and news media. But then what you also had is you had embeds for Instagram in all of these different sites, right? Like a news article, whatever posts, you know, linies, podcasts, Instagram account, and those embeds help with SEO juice.

1:12:15And so you have not just the invites, but now you have the celebrities, now you have the, you know, the SEO component. And then we would do a bunch of paid media on top of that using a lot of those signals. And so we have, and then we have our own content. And so you have all of these different kind of growth engines compounding each other. So every time the invitation's got better, every time I got more celebrity, every time SEO gets better, it's like magnifying the top funnel. And at the bottom of the funnel, like a mid funnel, we're making sure that people are retaining and getting value and staying around.

1:12:46That is so interesting. I had no idea. This was such a core part of the early growth strategy. Everything's always talking about reality and what a mouth, all these things in your saying, partnerships was a key part of the early growth strategy. That's so funny because it's never something people talk about in growth as partnerships. So there's a couple of companies that really had success from partnerships and BD. How early was this a big part of the strategy, like how early in the history? I mean, the partnership team was there before I joined. It was a very savvy and astute thing that Kevin and Mikey set up.

1:13:17They really kind of, they made, like the partnerships team, drove a lot of the word of mouth around Instagram. But it was the partnerships work in combination with the product work that actually helped to allow a lot of net to lane, right? Like it was our ability to think outside the box and understand that we needed to have our web presence because it was critical for international roles and it also helped with SEO, right? And so the idea of launching web really drove and actually increased Instagram growth by 10 % the minute we launched it. And it was something that George Wanger was there before me had the idea around it wasn't really something that Kevin and Mikey believed, and initially, but we had to prove to them that it was really impactful and once it launched, then they understood why it was impactful and all of it, effect of it.

1:14:07But what was really critical for driving so much SEO, which helped support a lot of the celebrity work and the partnerships work. Because now every time creator or celebrity did something on Instagram, every news media article picked it up and it just helped to drive searches and Google searches, which helped to make Instagram part of the cultural zeitgeist. This is so interesting because everyone imagines Instagram for reality or to mouth. Like SEO and partnerships, which sounds like a core part of Instagram's early growth, which I don't think anyone ever talked about. I mean, it was part of Facebook's growth too, right?

1:14:42but I think a little bit differently. It's not as much partnership for when you Google someone now you go to someone's name oftentimes Like Instagram is like one of the first five things that comes up for the average person. Yeah, right now write this on Instagram Twitter Do you ever see the video of Alex Zhu talking about TikTok's growth strategy of this whole? He had this metaphor where he was trying to grow off of Instagram So his metaphor was Instagram is like you're in Europe and you're killing it If you're in Europe and you're king, you don't ever want to go to America. There's no reason for you to give it up.

1:15:14And America is, is TikTok in this case. He's like, how do we convince people to come to America and try moving everything there? He's like, we need to go after the people that are not doing well in Europe, who want to be the king. And we're going to help you become that king in America or in the president. So he used the Jason using theory on us. Basically, it's interesting. That's right. You did. He's drink, drink up your shake. Yeah. Yeah, so I think, and I think the reason that strategy worked differently is there was already a place. So they couldn't execute what you did because there's already celebrities already there.

1:15:48And it's not like come here, there's no point. Yeah, I already have a huge falling. So I think make your own celebrities. Make your own celebrities exactly. And they went after like the Belis, Celis people. Right. So it's interesting that people look at it and say, I'm like, cool, we're gonna be partnerships SEO, But I think it's important to realize things change when the market is a different dynamic. You can't just do the same thing. You won't work as well Is there anything else from the Instagram early days that maybe people wouldn't know or would be interesting to share because you were there quite early And now it's maybe the most thriving social network in the world one thing that's actually I think interesting As an interesting story that doesn't talk about a lot is I think the early Instagram was built where it was built in a way where every follow was created equal.

1:16:33And what I mean by that is, you know, if I followed you Lenny or if I followed Kim Kardashian or if I followed Selena Gomez, all follows were treated like, you know, they were equally important. And this is actually a really important fact. There was a really important factor for a couple of reasons. One, early celebrities were adopted in the VAM. Obviously benefited from that because, you know, a celebrity's gonna get a follow before an average person does. It doesn't mean that like, you know, their follow weren't meaningful, it's just that like, you know, when you have a machine line that's just optimized for a click through a follow, then like, you know, that matters, but what ended up happening is, we ended up looking at the data, And I can't take credit for this, my colleague at the time, Rob Andrews identified this.

1:17:25He was the head of growth marketing, he was a pure mind, that basically, this is 2016ish days, the average person would come on Instagram and retain, but then leave after seven, eight, nine months. We saw like, we'd see a flattening and a retention curve, but then we would see it like dip again, which was very weird. and they're like, why is this happening? And it turned out that what was happening anecdotally is that people were rapping on Instagram, following a bunch of people, following a lot of celebrities, actually, because the slivers we can show them, and then when they actually went to make their first post, a few months later, none of their friends were following them.

1:18:06And so there was like posting into an echo chamber, and anecdotally people would stop using the product because they felt bad. We hypothesized. like no one was liking or following, like, or commenting on the post. And so we had to do this thing, we called it the connections pivot, right? In like 2016, 2016, so actually 2017, where we had to convince Kevin and Mikey that it was actually not the right thing to do to prioritize celebrities to everybody. Because we were basically biting on, cut was a, bite your nose, the spright your face, whatever that is. Like, you know, because the regular person wasn't having a great experience, right?

1:18:44So it doesn't mean that we shouldn't recommend celebrities, but you have recommend celebrities to people who are already on there, they already have their graph. And the most important thing to do is actually get regular human -cueing connections in the first, you know, whatever one people first sign up, so that when you let me actually go right to first, make your first post, like your friends would see it and you would be validated and you would feel like, okay, this is it, please, for me. Right? Like, I have a community here. And so that connection pivot was critical. It changed, it literally angle changed the retention on Instagram.

1:19:17And so if you like Google Instagram, where if there was like a tech crunch article about Instagram's growth that, you know, I think 2017, 2018, when we were going 40, 50 % year -to -year. And obviously there was a lot that went into that skyrocket. People think that stories was the sole reason why we grew. And story brought us a lot of people. But I mean, we literally are retention doubled over the course of like a year and a half. And if you can imagine, imagine if you're your bank account, like the interest rate doubles every month, you know what I mean? Like, it was incredible. Just this shift in making sure that people got connected with their friends early on, changed the way that people perceive the value.

1:19:57And so a lot of the top of the fun work that we did, a lot of the activation work that we did, really paid off in speeds, ultimately. Wow. I'm curious, what's the most impactful thing you've shipped, slash let's you in terms of impact and experiment launch. At Instagram, we saw this big problem where people were logging out and not being able to get back into their account. It was crazy. Like hundreds of thousands of people a day could not get back into their account. And it was because, and like, when I say could not get back into the account, I mean, They literally wouldn't try, and 28 days later we would never see them again.

1:20:40And we thought it was a problem because they didn't remember where the email was, which email they signed up with or what their actual handle was or what their password was. And so this was, you know, we were losing 10, 12 million people a year from what we call account, account access, so we worked on this problem and we had spent a lot of time in South Asia and Southeast Asia trying to understand how to grow the product and from that time we realized that it's important actually for people to be able to log out. We don't want to restrict people's ability to log out because there are many people in the world who don't want to use background data because they own prepaid phone plans or they don't have a lot of money and they want to share their phone with a sibling and so they log out and so it's really important so we don't want to take away that behavior but we did have to do our better job of helping them get back in.

1:21:39So we did two things. One was like there used to be a time and you can probably find it on Google if you did like an archive search with if you wanted to log into your Instagram account there would be a tab for your email and then there'll be a tag for your handle. And we didn't really make it easy for you to log in with your phone number either. You had to get to the right tab and the right place to get the right thing. So we did this OmniBox experience where it was just like email phone handle, put it all in one place. And we made it super simple for you. In the second time, if you tried it twice and it didn't work, if we knew that you were on a trusted device, we would just send you a text message and say, hey, are you trying to log in, right?

1:22:21That solved like half the problem. And then the other half, what we did, and this still exists today when it's, when it's, when it's, when you log out, we say, hey, Lenny, it looks like you're gonna log out. Do you want us to save your credentials on your device? So you don't have to worry about your password, right? And then we later added an ability to have a password. And that solved basically the other half, right? And so just like being really thoughtful around like, what is actually the core job that people are trying to do? Because a bad experience would have been like, hey, let's make it really hard for people to walk out, right?

1:22:50And then how we like wanted to experiments really helped people to get back into Experience and so what was interesting was that like we were able to solve this and it's actually called drive public 15 20 million Extra month that the users a year, but was also super interesting was that It helped us to realize that getting people back into their account more or drove more account content creation on the internet in ways that we didn't expect. And so because we were getting people back into the account, people getting into the second account, they getting into the third account, and they were going into the offence of the account and creating content more.

1:23:33And so that actually led to the creation of a multiple accounts team, which is what has made it easy for you to navigate between accounts on Instagram today. And so that was understand what actually coming to life. Like it was, hey, we're going to do the understand work to figure out how to solve account access issues. And we're going to solve it and solve it. And when we looked at the data, we're like, hey, why is all this account, like why is all this content creation happening? That was not what we were expecting. And where is it happening? And it was happening from second and third accounts.

1:24:05And so that made us realize that, oh, people were not only getting locked out of the first accounts, but they were actually creating a lot on the second and third accounts. How can we make it easy for them to get and navigate between their first account, whether it's like your account and a business account, your account and a finance account, or like a bakery account, you know what I mean? And so that created a multiple accounts team which I ended up owning and that ended up even becoming like a bigger after that. That's like an example of like, under fan work to solve a real problem, real solve and solving massive solution, massive impact, creating new data that you didn't expect.

1:24:36they drive a new understand work which creates a whole new team to allow you to move around your Instagram account more seamlessly. You can see this now when you go to Posts, you can decide, okay, I want to post this, Lenny, all in the Posts, this other thing. Or when I want to write a story, you can change anywhere. That was all an effort that originally came out of this realization. I love how many of these huge impact stories are just like such straightforward simple things, like just let people log in more easily. help them log out more effectively, find, show them their friends versus celebrities.

1:25:08Like so many of these stories are often just like really simple ideas that lead to such profound change. The log out example is interesting. It are being be we found. The log out was actually causing a lot of turn also. But they went there initially they went with the simple solution of just extend the session log out length instead of like a week make it two weeks or three weeks or four weeks. You pointed out what Instagram people actually want it to log out. or let's leave that alone and start with making you zero log back in. That's right. Amazing. Man, you're so full of amazing stories. I'm curious with Facebook, maybe just as I wrap up here, is there anything there?

1:25:43Because you were an early PM, a growth PM at Facebook, worked a lot on friends and helping people discover their friends. Is there anything there that would be interesting to share? In my time, I joined Facebook in 2014 and I was responsible for people recommendations globally. And at the time, Facebook was at scale and big and dominated North America. And so really the focus area at the time was South Asia and Southeast Asia. And, you know, we did, and we noticed a lot of really interesting things, especially in India, Facebook seemed to be broken from a people graph perspective. Like, we just didn't, the data was telling us like people didn't have as many friends in common.

1:26:23In the US, they might have been making up a number of, when average we saw 22 friends in common when you make a friendship connection, but in India it was like seven. And then there was a lot of fringying and messaging and fringying and unfriending. We're like, what's going on here? So we had some hypotheses from the data, we ran a bunch of tests. Nothing seemed to work and be a breakthrough. So actually at that time, I had to propose and they agreed to do this. We needed to do our own jammer. So we were literally on the ground in the year every three months took a team of engineers with me like I'm talking like we're in Delhi and people's homes and you know Mumbai and We went to go kind of investigate what was going on like watch people make friends Watch them let use people you may know and really understand what was happening and see what was going on because we felt like there was context There's a lot of things that we learned it was mind blowing But one of the most interesting things landing was that we Watched people try to make friends and we said hey wait like that's their profile page.

1:27:28Why aren't you looking at it? And they would say well That doesn't have any relevant information for me. So I need to go look in the pictures Like well, why doesn't the profile page have relevant information for you? That's where Information supposed to be and they're like listen this guy's name amit Kumar. I have ten friends name amit Kumar Like, what is this page going to tell me? Also, and they would scroll down, they'd be like, all of these fields are not relevant to me. And so you look at a Facebook at the time with very Western and Central, it's published in the list. It was like name, school you went to, job title, like affiliations, that kind of stuff.

1:28:08That's all Western paradigms. And like, some of these people are like, my friends sell jeans at a market. And I know this is relevant. Like, you don't even know the name of a school sometimes. right, it might be at number or something. And so all of the descriptors that we take for granted were not relevant and the names are very common. This was really illuminate. So what they would do is go look at pictures and say, is this my friend's car or is this my friend's, like can I see my friend's animal and what's available. And it was interesting because you know the understanding work released the more realizations so we went back to Millowork with the data, turned out we said, okay let's look at the David in a different way.

1:28:43What are the most common names on Facebook? And we looked at the top 10 common names or Indian names. And like the most common name was Amit Kumar. And it was like 250 ,000 people a month who used Amit Kumar. Like who would like real people? So imagine you're in Bangalore and you're trying to find your buddy named Amit Kumar is probably 5 ,000 that we could possibly recommend to you. Right? So like super interesting, it was like the cultural context was so different. So we had to get creative, find creative ways to figure out how to solve it. The power of understand work shines again. We have a recurring segment on this podcast called Fail Corner where ask guests to share a time they failed in their career and what they learned from that experience because a lot of people look at your career and your story and just like, holy shit, what a journey I will never be able to achieve this.

1:29:30Is there a time when things didn't go well and something that you took away from that experience? Probably for me, I think my time at Instacart was probably not my best time. I think I went to Instacart with the vision of what I felt the product could be or should be. And it was, I think, a big story that I deeply believed. But I was not, I think, aware or ensued with what the DNA of the company was at the time, which was it was like a company that was really great at operations and because that was the core where they did and they're really building out a lot of their product experience and a lot of what like the new function.

1:30:20And so I think what they needed at the time was a much more tactical in the weeds, kind of like get your hands dirty, do, do, do, because they had really seen that before. And what I wanted to deliver in that experience, was more kind of like building the right systems, the right people, the right processes, so that we can like figure out how that institutionalized the work. And then for me, that was like, probably that my biggest oversight is that like, I think I, I think they needed more tactical And I was like kind of more, I don't say in the clouds, but more think about like where do we want to go with the experience that we need to build versus like, let me get deep in like the funnel data.

1:31:04Right. And it felt like it like became loggerheads where I didn't feel like I was like probably either delivering what they wanted or being support in the way that I wanted to be support. Is the lesson there to spend more time and understand work before you take a job to make sure you're aligned with what they're looking for. That is actually a lesson. And I think it's part of that is it's doing that one of my takeaways is do that not only with the people there But with the people who've left it to Like the people who've left the company will give you a perspective that is raw and different and much more I think aligned with what you want to hear and it may or may not be the same But I think that the people and this isn't specific incidents of course like whenever you talk to people who are at the company and they always try to tell you the best version of the company.

1:31:50The people left will tell you what the worst version they're or their version and it's on you to try and enjoy the information, but you need both sides. Love that lesson. Bengali, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting Lightning round? No, no, I think we've got a lot. We have. With that, we reached our very exciting Lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? I am ready to go. First question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? A few, I've recommended most of them over my shoulder actually like range by David Hatsonine.

1:32:24I think it's really critical. PM work really being able to be a master of a lot of different things or somewhat deep in a lot of different things. Deep work, county work, kind of clearing space to be focused and do the things thinking about the most important work in a deep and like underserved way. And then start at the end by Matt Waller, there's a kind of behavioral scientist, but in my really thoughtful book helps you kind of really think about what you're building, but in a way that's like more holistic. Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them?

1:32:54It's got a relatively new one that I love. It is so, this works exceptionally well, I believe for more senior hires, whether they're like group product managers, directors, or even like kind of senior ICs, I go through and I think about what are the four, usually five skills that are really critical for someone to have in this job. And I think about them myself and I think about the archetypes of like, who are, what, what, like, what is the ratio I want to piece? But then I ask them, I say, hey, take out a piece of paper or take out your laptop. I'm going to give you five skills and I want you to stack, link them for me.

1:33:33One to five. Right? So one being the one you're stronger at, and five being the one you're relatively weak at. So like it's way better than saying, give me your strengths and weaknesses. It also forces them to contextualize it against the skill that you're looking for. But it also helps you have a meaningful conversation around how they think about themselves and their self -awareness, and to what extent they're ranking these skills based on the context they're in, right? It's their own ability. Sometimes you write something of five because something you'll just reek at because you haven't had to do because there's a strong function at that company.

1:34:09And so when they stack right here, and people are like, I've asked this part before five times on a recent role of hire people, this is a really hard, really good question. And then you can learn, I usually will dig into what if number two, and what's number four, number five, and why? And it really helps me to want to calibrate, like am I looking for the right person? And to all the skills actually a match for what we need at this time. I love when I hear a question I've never heard before that is genius. Next question, do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?

1:34:41I think one that I've been enjoying quite a lot actually is really kind of really simple but amazing is this app called Flighty? You have a bit of LIGHTLY. It is a travel app and it manages all of your flight itineraries and your friends' itineraries. But the reason why I love it is it goes two or three clicks deeper than the average travel app or like your airline app. And it tells you when your inbound plane is run with it helps you to understand like where the gates on my wife was just in Madrid last week and she texted me saying hey I'm at the airport but no gate is announced. I looked at flighty.

1:35:20I'm like your gate is E67. It's actually been assigned, but it hasn't been announced. And this happens a lot in Europe, right? Like you'll read it, and it won't tell you the gate until like an hour beforehand. So it gives you so much information right before it's actually publicly announced, which is really helpful, especially if you really need to be somewhere because oftentimes I know if my plan's going to be late and if I need to re -book before anyone else does. Right? Which helps you give you a better chance of getting to somewhere, or like I will be able to get to a gate, I get to SFO, and it might not be on the board and that's a throw, but I know exactly what you do.

1:35:50So we agree that can't say enough about it. I'm downloading it right now. It's got a bazillion reviews, five stars. Thank you for the recommendation. Credibly useful. I'm trying out a new question. You've joined a bunch of different companies. What's one thing that you've done in the first 90 days at the jobs that has made a big impact? I go and I sit in team meetings and see how they operate. I just will listen. I talk to not only the PMs but the end content designer and everyone and I try to get to know them by both name and story. Right? And what I mean by that's like oftentimes people all execs come in and they're like, what are we doing?

1:36:32What are we prioritizing? Why's it matter? And they don't really take the time to actually learn who the people are, what their story is, like what they, what they care about, like what professionally and personally and really try to understand how the team is working from that person's perspective. And what I find is actually when I do that, people are way more willing to hear when it's time for me to share my thoughts, they're way more invested because I'm, because they believe I'm invested in that. I love that. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite live motto that you really like and find useful and often share with friends or family and worker and life.

1:37:16I'm not big on models. There's one that I've actually been repeating. I don't remember. I got a thumb. I'd have been like Adam Grant or someone on Instagram. But it was, it's one I said to a colleague of mine. He's like, wow, that really hit differently. It's that, like, I think it goes something like this, like, you know, people and teams don't really reach us. They don't actually reach their goals. they fall to the level of their systems. And that to me was really powerful because like I struggle a lot with like just being balanced in life, like working out the way I want to and getting the right rest and making sure that I'm spending time in all the way places.

1:37:53And that's really like, it's a gold of mine, but like the problem is that like I don't my system for that specifically, I tend to like you know, not, I don't, I don't, I'm not rigorous with it is what I need to be. But on the other hand, at work, I'm very rigorous in systems and processes. So really like that saying to me, really like kind of hits because it is both applicable to your life and how you're going to live your life, but also how you want to win your teams. Final question you mentioned that you were a dean at a school and a boarding school. Is there something that you take away from that experience that's going to stick with you?

1:38:28I know you mentioned one thing about treat PMs and skills are similar to teacher skills or anything else there. Actually, so I was a dean of a boarding school in Switzerland, which was like, actually one of the most fun and interesting times of my life. It was an American school in Switzerland just outside of Lugano, Switzerland, many times being sectioned. And I'd say, you know, what was, I learned a lot about myself during the time. I learned a lot about relationships and people. I actually had a call with one of my old students this morning. She's like, in her 30s now, this was like 20 years ago.

1:39:01So I still keep in touch with them. And I think that's the comment I made of knowing through my name and story, bad of a lot. It says a lot that 20 years later, I'm still talking to some of these students who are like their own adults, run their own businesses. But also, I think the human challenges and human connection, human problems, very universal. This was a really interesting place where you had kids coming from a variety of different walks of life. Some who lived in Azerbaijan or Kosovo and felt like the families felt like they couldn't be safe there so they wanted to send the kids somewhere else.

1:39:37Some kids whose parents worked at the US Embassy and just were kind of there for a little bit of time. And what I found to be true is that like just spending time with people and understanding their own story and family life really led to a lot of kind of like shared interest and passions and it helped to really me to see that the world can be very similar in so many ways and it is very much reflected to me in my data and life and tech because as you know in the Bay Area there's so many people who come from so many walks of life who end up in this journey building these products and companies and just helped me to value so many different voices.

1:40:15Right? Like if you want to build world -class products, if you want to build product that can scale around the world, if you want to build product that's going to have the growth, you have to be inclusive of so many voices. And so you have to build that skill to be able to acknowledge and learn from and to live in tension with different voices. That is beautiful. I love that we're ending there. Big Gully, I feel like we've done a lot of understand work and I think we've helped a lot of people with a lot of things. We talked about so much. Two final questions, working folks finding a line if they want to follow what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you.

1:40:47For as much as I work, these social companies actually don't use my social products that much. I'm on Instagram. Like if you look at I am Bengali, I am the NGA, all by, go with that, all of my like socials, handles, all have the same kind of like link, including LinkedIn, so hit me up whenever. And then what can people do, useful for me? I mean, I think I don't have a like a short list. I would say I love to hear people's stories. I love to get advice, obviously my time is a little bit limited occasionally, but I think if people can share with me things that they're learning or things that they see in the market or if they have questions, I always love to hear it.

1:41:29And so I think for me, like, you know, just healing other people's stories and one, what other people are doing is probably the most rewarding for me. Bengali, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This is amazing. I really appreciate you learning. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast dot com.

1:42:01See you in the next episode!